Connectives and Necessity

 

 

In Naming and Necessity Kripke argues against the description theory of names and offers a theory-sketch to be put in its place, often labeled the causal theory. He then extends his critique to apply to common nouns (natural kind terms) contending that they too are not to be defined by means of descriptions but rather owe their reference to certain kinds of causal chain. What he doesn’t do is inquire into whether the critique can be extended yet further. Here I will do just that, focusing initially on logical connectives such as “and”, “or”, and “not”. The question, then, is whether these terms satisfy a description theory, and if not what kind of theory should be put in its place. Instead of employing the notion of reference, which may appear tendentious, we may prefer to formulate the issue in terms of the “semantic value” of such terms, so the question becomes whether (say) the term “and” has the semantic value of conjunction in virtue of the fact that speakers associate certain individuating descriptions with “and”. To fix ideas, we might cite a description like “the truth function that has such and such a truth table”, though a description like “Russell’s favorite truth function” is not to be ruled out on logical grounds. When a speaker uses “and” to refer to (express) conjunction does she do so by having a description in mind along these lines? Does she pick out conjunction with a description like “the truth function with such and such a truth table” and then abbreviate that with the monosyllable “and”? Does she have a little logician in her head that knows how to characterize conjunction uniquely? This would be the analogue of having a little historian in your head that enables you to refer to Winston Churchill using “Winston Churchill” by knowing various historical facts about that individual, such as that he was the prime minister of Great Britain during World War II.

It is easy to see that this kind of theory runs up against the same kinds of problems Kripke diagnosed for ordinary proper names. The main one is the problem of error: speakers may make mistakes about the properties of the things they refer to. In the Godel/Schmidt example, the obscure Schmidt is the inventor of the incompleteness theorem not Godel, yet people still refer to Godel with “Godel” and not Schmidt despite associating “the inventor of the incompleteness theorem” with the name “Godel”—their mistaken belief does not direct their reference towards Schmidt. Similarly, a logically inept speaker might wrongly suppose that a conjunction can be true if only one of its conjuncts is true (he would be a very logically inept speaker), but that wouldn’t mean that his use of “and” expresses disjunction not conjunction. The reason in both cases (according to Kripke) is that there is an historical and social dimension to the meaning of the relevant terms in a given speaker’s mouth—the speaker refers to what people in the past in general referred to with “Godel” or “and”. He just happens to have a false belief about what he is referring to (this would be even clearer if the description the speaker had in mind were “Russell’s favorite truth function” in the situation in which actually Russell liked disjunction more). Likewise, just as a speaker might refer to Feynman with “Feynman” even if all he knows about the physicist is that he is some famous physicist or other, a speaker might refer to conjunction with “and” even if all he can tell you is that conjunction is some kind of truth function or other. The community’s use of the word in question ensures its reference in an individual’s mouth; his ignorance of facts about the reference doesn’t undermine that. This applies as much to connectives as to proper names. It is in fact an instance of a perfectly general point, namely that what people believe about the things they talk about is not determinative of the reference of their words. You can have all sorts of false beliefs about things and still mean what other people mean by their words. Clearly, the point about “and” can be carried over to “or” and “not”, so our logical vocabulary is not subject to a description theory (assuming Kripke is right about proper names).[1]

Here is another instructive case: the word “necessary”. How does it refer? First, note that it can refer to two different things—metaphysical necessity and epistemic necessity (compare a single name with two referents). Suppose we take it to refer to metaphysical necessity: is this because speakers have true individuating beliefs about metaphysical necessity? Hardly: they might have quite wrong ideas about this kind of necessity. Suppose someone believes that such necessity is truth in all possible worlds whereas in fact there are no possible worlds and metaphysical necessity is a primitive modal property. Then they have a false belief about the reference of their words, but the words still have a determinate reference, viz. metaphysical necessity. Or suppose the speaker thinks the notion corresponds to some outdated and supernatural concept of the metaphysical whereas in fact it is definable in elementary modal logic. That doesn’t cause them to refer to nothing or to something supernatural with the word “necessary”; their personal beliefs are irrelevant to the semantic content of the communal words they use. Or again, they might just know that metaphysical necessity is some kind of necessity or other—they can’t personally distinguish it from epistemic necessity—and yet they still refer to metaphysical necessity not epistemic necessity. The same might be said of the word “causation”: does it refer to whatever satisfies the speaker’s descriptive beliefs? Clearly not, since the speaker might have quite erroneous beliefs about the nature of causation (she might think that causation is nothing but constant conjunction). Ditto for the words “identity” or “true” or “beauty” or “good” or “space” or “time” or any number of other words. The reference of these words will not follow the idiosyncratic false beliefs of individual users. We can’t find out what they refer to in a given speaker’s mouth by surveying the descriptive contents of his or her mind. Just consider all the erroneous beliefs that surround such words as “democracy”, “God”, “morality”, “death”, “consciousness”: none of this matters to the actual semantic content of the word as it is used in a given linguistic community. The point has nothing specifically to do with proper names; it is a general point about the relation between meaning and belief.[2]

Compare syntax and phonetics. No one thinks that the syntactic and phonetic properties of an utterance are determined by the speaker’s beliefs about them. They are a matter of the language itself not what the speaker believes about the language. People can have all sorts of false beliefs about syntax and phonetics—they are not made true by the fact that beliefs about language fix the nature of language, because there is no such fact. Why should semantics be different? What people believe about the reference of their words is not what fixes the actual reference of their words. Kripke claims that causal chains fix the reference of proper names, but the same kind of point applies to any meaningful word—the meaning-determining facts are not facts about individual belief. This is why false beliefs don’t alter meaning. We might put this by saying that the language faculty is independent of the belief faculty (compare the perceptual faculty). A pure causal theory of reference removes reference altogether from belief as a means of reference fixation, but the falsity of description theories already undermines such a theory. So the defects of the description theory of names reflect a much more general point about belief and meaning, as we can see by considering other types of word. It is certainly not true that each word in a sentence has its reference (semantic value) fixed by descriptive knowledge possessed by the speaker; and it is demonstrable that no word is semantically equivalent to a definite description (except a definite description).[3] The point I have been making is that Kripke’s critique of names is just part of a larger critique, and in the light of that larger critique is entirely predictable.[4]

 

[1] It wouldn’t be difficult to construct a similar case for quantifier words by imagining speakers with false beliefs about the properties of quantifiers.

[2] I haven’t discussed rigid designation in connection with the generalized description theory, but an analogue of it holds for connectives and the like (de jure rigid semantic value). The most effective argument Kripke deploys is the error argument, so I have focused on that.

[3] It is true that there can be “descriptive names”, i.e. names stipulated to be equivalent to descriptions (“Let ‘Stanley’ be synonymous with ‘the lizard in my living room’”). But that is not the situation with ordinary proper names.

[4] Another line of argument is that the description theory presupposes reference because the components of descriptions are themselves referential, as in “the father of that girl”. Kripke does not deploy this type of argument and I will leave it aside here.

 

 

 

Existence and Consciousness

 

 

The idealist sees an essential connection between existence and consciousness: there is no existence where there is no consciousness. Can we make anything of this thought? Suppose an otherwise empty region of space contains an instance of consciousness, say an experience or thought; then we can rightly say that something exists in that region. Consciousness is the kind of thing that confers existence (this is the root of the Cogito). The thing that exists might be said to be the conscious state itself or its bearer (the subject of consciousness). Moreover, this thing is a concrete empirical existent not a merely abstract one. Consciousness is a paradigm of existence; it leaves no doubt of existence. Contrast consciousness with matter: suppose we stipulate that within a certain region of space there is extension, i.e. length, breadth, height, size, shape. Is it an immediate consequence of this that something exists in that space additional to the space itself? No, because space itself has extension, i.e. geometrical properties. It doesn’t follow from the instantiation of geometric properties that space contains an actual concrete empirical thing. Something needs to be added—something concrete. To put it another way, the concept of extension is a mathematical concept, so if matter is defined in terms of extension, we won’t be able to derive concrete existence from it. There is no analogue of the Cogito as follows: “X has extension, therefore X is a material existent”—not if matter is a concrete empirical thing. Thus consciousness brings existence with it while matter (defined as extension) doesn’t: we can’t get our ordinary concept of a material thing out of mere extension. It would be different if we could supplement extension with substance in the Scholastic sense, but that notion is not available owing to unintelligibility (certainly anathema to Descartes). Intuitively, we have no account of the distinction between empty space and what materially occupies it. We thus don’t know what the existence of matter consists in: the concept of extension (geometry) leaves it schematic, abstract, merely mathematical. To be sure, matter has extension, but what we don’t know is the nature of the thing that has it; whereas we do know the nature of consciousness, i.e. what it is that exists when consciousness exists. We have a real conception of mental existence, but we don’t have a real conception of physical existence. In practice we fill out the abstract notion of extension with the concepts derived from our perception of material things, e.g. color, but these have a mental origin, so they can’t be what the objective existence of matter consists in. The suspicion is that when we speak of the existence of material things we know not whereof we speak.[1]

This is where the idealist plants his flag: the only way to explicate the nature of material existence is to borrow from mental existence—material things are really mental in nature. Then we will understand how material things can have concrete existence, just like mental things—they are mental things. They might be sense impressions in human minds or ideas in the mind of God or a special kind of primitive consciousness found in so-called material reality (panpsychism and its ilk). According to each theory, material things turn out to have the kind of existence possessed by mental things. Existence is thus univocal and uniform: all of reality exists in the same way. It is not that minds exist in virtue of one kind of property and bodies exist in virtue of another kind—existence is always mental. To exist is to be conscious in some shape or form. The price of rejecting idealism is to render the existence of bodies problematic, not to say impossible. For what else could their existence consist in? You might try saying that bodies have properties other than extension such as mass, charge and solidity: where these properties are instantiated there must be existence. But these are merely dispositional properties, unlike extension, and so raise the question of what grounds them: what is the intrinsic nature of body? The existence of a thing cannot consist solely in its dispositional properties on pain of rendering it mere possibilia. Again, the contrast with consciousness is stark: in its case we do have a grasp of the intrinsic nature of the existent thing. The idealist insists on something analogous in the case of material bodies, and it is obscure what that might be if it is not more consciousness.

There is a possible view that can block the idealist’s argument, namely that matter possesses an unknown type of intrinsic property that plays the existence-conferring role of consciousness without being consciousness.[2]Call this property M: then we can say that bodies exist in virtue of instantiating M, where M is not identical with C(consciousness). This seems like a logically available position, but one can appreciate why the idealist will jib at it: why postulate such an unknown property when we have a well-known property that can demonstrably do the job of securing concrete existence? Isn’t the idealist position less hand waving, more parsimonious, more intellectually satisfying? Why go noumenal and mysterian when idealism offers such a nice uniform theory? Idealism tells us exactly what existence consists in, intelligibly and invariably, so why speculate about hypothetical unknown properties? Without it we are left with no positive account of what physical existence amounts to—a mere I-know-not-what.

Historically, idealism arose from Descartes and Newton’s mathematical conception of the material world: there was a distinct danger that the material universe might disappear in a puff off mathematical smoke.[3] Indeed, it wasn’t long before theorists began doubting the concrete existence of material things and regarding such talk in an instrumental fashion. If matter is really geometry, we might as well regard talk of it as so much applied mathematics. Physics seemed to take the substance out of the world—it took the body out of body. But idealism resisted this etiolating tendency: it allowed us to recover our sense of the concrete reality of body, albeit in mental form. Before mathematical physics arrived, Aristotle’s teleological physics allowed the concept of purpose to fill out the theory of motion; and purpose could plausibly be supposed to guarantee concrete existence—what has purpose must exist. But once this is banished and classical mechanism is allowed to fix the nature of matter (bloodless extension), a gap opens up in our conception of matter, a gap that threatens its very existence. The contrast between mind and matter becomes unsustainable and matter loses its grip on concrete reality. Thus Berkeley meets fertile ground for saving bodies from evaporating into abstract posits. At least with Berkeley we know what it is for bodies to exist! Idealism allows matter to have the kind of being we understand—the kind possessed by our own minds. Berkeley’s world is a world of complete intelligible existence, whereas Descartes’ world is a world of intelligible existence (the mind) alongside a world of unintelligible existence or faux existence (matter). The fundamental problem is that extension by itself is not sufficient to deliver concrete material being. Nor is it clear that anything in contemporary physics is sufficient either, which is why the physical world is apt to appear theoretically ethereal. In order to deliver concrete reality our conception of matter needs beefing up, and idealism offers itself as the only viable way to do that. For the idealist, existence without consciousness is no existence at all, because in the end consciousness is the only intelligible form of existence there is.[4]

 

[1] Here I am summarizing thoughts that have been around for centuries, from Descartes to Russell, Berkeley to Mach.

[2] This is the view that I myself am inclined to accept, mainly because I see objections to the idealist picture; here I am just trying to give idealism its best shot.

[3] Surely part of the reason we have trouble with Platonism in mathematics is that we can’t form a clear conception of what mathematical existence would be; we feel we are taking it on faith. Numbers are quite unlike episodes of consciousness, in which existence is carried on their face: hence the attraction of mentalist theories of numbers and nominalism generally.

[4] Let me emphasize the alternative—that there are other forms of existence that are unintelligible to us. This position is by no means absurd. The question then becomes whether idealism faces insurmountable problems (I won’t discuss this here).

 

 

 

Intelligibility

 

 

The concept of intelligibility is often used by philosophers but not often analyzed. The OED gives this simple definition of “intelligible”: “able to be understood”, but it follows that up with a definition proper to philosophy: “able to be understood only by the intellect”. The intellect is the faculty that makes things intelligible; without it nothing would be. Clearly, intelligibility is a relational concept: something (we are not told what) is intelligible only if it is understood (possibly potentially) by someone, or by someone’s intellect. Logically, the concept is like being perceivable or knowable: a non-mental entity is said to be perceivable or knowable or intelligible in relation to a mind equipped with certain cognitive powers. We might paraphrase the dictionary definition by saying that something is intelligible if and only if it is graspable by the intellect (not by the senses or the faculty of knowing): it is intellectual apprehension. But what is that exactly? One tradition has it that intellectual apprehension belongs to the domain of the a priori—mathematics, logic, the forms, maybe philosophy itself. But it would be wrong to limit the concept to these areas, since the empirical world can be intelligible too, i.e. understood by the intellect. This is a special kind of cognition, distinct from perception and knowledge—superior, deeper, more penetrating. In it the world is made peculiarly transparent to the mind, not in a blur or superficially or inadequately. It is, we might say, an elevated type of insight, not to be identified with simply knowing brute facts.

What would count as paradigm instances of the intelligible? Mathematics is the standard example, both pure and applied. Numbers and geometric figures are inherently intelligible, but so is their application to the world: when we describe the world mathematically we make it intelligible, because we make it graspable by the intellect. Mathematical laws are the central examples. This doesn’t mean that everything in physics is intelligible, but the common assumption is that physics is our best hope of rendering the world intelligible–and mathematics is central to physics. However, there is another area of intelligibility that should be mentioned—belief-desire psychology. We make actions intelligible by relating them to beliefs and desires: actions are intelligible in the light of the beliefs and desires that lead to them. We render the action rational by describing it in this way, and hence we understand it; there is nothing brute or opaque about it. Just as with mathematics, there is a whiff of the a priori: the idea of rationality as a normative domain is invoked–hence the practical syllogism.[1] In both cases an ideal structure is brought to bear on concrete reality, thereby rendering it intelligible. This is not something we detect with our senses; we apply it, by means of the intellect, to the things we perceive. We render the world intelligible rather than see it to be so.[2]

I am inclined to suppose that these are the only cases of intelligibility in the natural world. Mere perceptual knowledge is never by itself intelligible knowledge; nor is causal knowledge, since it merely tells us what causes what, not what abstract principles underlie the causal connections. Physics might tell us that gravity causes motion, but without a mathematical law this does not render nature intelligible. Animals can have perceptual and causal knowledge, but they don’t have intelligible knowledge of the kind delivered by mathematical physics. Cartesian mechanism was supposed to make the physical world intelligible and it was a quantitative account of matter and motion. The case of biology is interesting: it is not generally thought of as having an a priori component, but it is supposed to provide understanding of the biological world. Does Darwin’s theory make evolution intelligible? It has a mathematical side because it uses the notion of frequency—advantageous traits lead to greater frequency in the population than disadvantageous ones. And we can quantify many aspects of animal behavior and genetic propagation. But there is also the teleological notion of function, which brings biology close to psychology: the heart beats as it does because that is its function (compare: a person beats a drum because he desires to). It is as if bodily organs desire to do what it is their function to do. Moreover, the standard way of understanding natural selection is analogous to intentional selection by agents—nature selects certain organisms to survive as selective breeders do. So biology falls under teleological conceptions and hence inherits the intelligibility that belongs to such conceptions (it is the same for theories that attribute evolution to God’s design). Thus biology is not a clear counterexample to the thesis that mathematics and teleology are the sole types of intelligibility. Merely knowing that clouds cause rain does not render the cloud-rain nexus intelligible: we must either treat it mathematically or conceive it teleologically to do that. In fact, the mathematical method works in this case because we can describe clouds as aggregates of water droplets subject to mathematically describable forces—rain thereby becomes intelligible.

Are these two modes of intelligibility unrelated? They certainly seem so at first glance: mathematics is one thing, psychology another. But perhaps there are some significant commonalities or areas of overlap. Psychology has its quantitative aspects, both scientific and common sense; in particular, we have the ideas of strength of desire and degree of belief. These are formalized in decision theory, a mathematical theory; so ordinary psychological understanding is capable of mathematical formulation in addition to being teleological. There is also a good deal of mathematics in the psychology of perception and elsewhere. We thus have a kind of double intelligibility in psychology, though the mathematical component is not as salient as it is in physics. In the case of mathematics itself, we can ask whether it has any teleological dimension, any built-in purpose. Formalists might say so, relying on the notion that mathematics reduces to symbolism and symbolism has a purpose; an instrumentalist view of mathematics would then be indicated. The same can be said for intuitionism: mathematics is a mental construction and that construction has a purpose—it is a kind of mental artifact that we employ in certain ways. Mathematics has a purpose and our application of it to the empirical world is the fulfillment of that purpose. Platonism, however, seems to banish purpose from mathematics, viewing it as a non-human objective realm of reality that pre-dates human existence. But that is not so clear on reflection: for there is an uncanny fit between mathematics as an abstract inquiry and the nature of empirical reality. For example, numbers are remarkably useful for counting objects, and geometry seems tailor made for describing objects in space. Is this just a happy accident? One could swear that mathematics was designed so as to be applied in these ways. Yet, according to Platonism, mathematical reality follows its own internal rules and was not constructed by human minds in any way. Its usefulness is therefore entirely contingent, extrinsic to its inner nature. Thus Platonism pulls away from the idea that mathematics has a purpose that is realized in its applications.

Here an ingenious theist may spot his chance: God designed mathematics to be both an objective abstract structure and imbued with purpose! His relation to mathematics is like our relation to our machines: both are objective constituents of reality but both are also purposive. Mathematics is objective-cum-functional.[3] So even Platonism may be understood (at a stretch) to incorporate a teleological dimension, though obscurely so; in which case, it shares something with psychology. The two are not then completely separate conceptually, though it would obviously be wrong to reduce one to the other. If so, we have a more unified or integrated theory of intelligibility than we might have hoped for: our two paradigm cases turn out to have more in common than appears at first sight. We might even speak of the “teleological-mathematical” as the cornerstone of intelligibility: this joint conceptual structure is the key to making nature intelligible to ourselves—transparent to the intellect. Where it applies we have intelligibility–otherwise we don’t.

And what about unintelligibility? What are the paradigm cases of that? Nonsense is surely at the top of the list—garbled speech, ungrammatical sentences, and rampant non sequitur. Here we can make no sense of what we hear: the words don’t add up to a semantically coherent whole. The purpose of words is to join with other words according to rules to produce meaningful sentences, but in nonsense speech this purpose breaks down. The combinatorial power of grammar, itself a type of computational structure, fails to apply to nonsensical products. There is an absence of both fulfilled purpose and mathematical order: it is like saying, “Zero plus addition over prime number equals infinity”—mathematical nonsense. In nonsense abstract form and purpose fail to apply. And the same is true of actions in general: a person’s actions are said to be unintelligible when we can discern no purpose in them, when even the abstract structure belief and desire fails to apply. We also find unintelligibility in science—quantum theory being the prime example. The idea of God playing dice with the universe is an expression of teleological chaos at the root of things—what could God’s purpose be in playing cosmic dice? We feel we cannot make sense of things if no agency could ever act as reality is thought to demand. In the case of the mysteries of mind we also use the notion of unintelligibility—for example, the nexus of consciousness and the brain is said to be unintelligible. Here again we have no coherent mathematics to apply and it is difficult to see how the brain can fulfill the purpose of producing consciousness. If we could see how an agent could build a brain so as to mathematically guarantee that consciousness would be the result, then we would regard the psychophysical nexus as intelligible; but we lack any such understanding, so we declare the connection unintelligible, at least for now. Thus the scaffolding of intelligibility applies in some areas but not in all, more or less dramatically. We can bring it to bear in some cases but not in every case. It is the idea (and ideal) of making intellectual sense—conformity to the paradigms of mathematics and commonsense psychology being the model.

We try to extend the paradigms into various corners of the world; sometimes we succeed, sometimes not. If we lacked these conceptual structures, nothing would be intelligible to us—we would at best have perceptual and causal knowledge (as we may presume is the state of animal cognition). The special type of comprehension that we call intellectual understanding is constituted by these two types of thinking—the mathematical and the teleological. They afford us a kind of transparency and order not available otherwise. And notice that they are not perceptually based: we don’t see the world as mathematically or teleologically ordered; we bring these notions tothe given, rather than deriving them from it. They are not licensed by strict empiricism. There is something projective at work here—imposed, self-generated. We make the world intelligible; we don’t find it to be so—except in the sense that we discover that things turn out that way. We apply our intellect to empirical reality and thereby render it intelligible; we don’t have impressions of intelligibility as we have impressions of color and shape. Intelligibility is not a sense datum.

Some strains of thought have it that the world is actually not intelligible at all, not as an objective trait of reality. Instead we force it into an appearance of intelligibility by imposing our own minds on it. Thus nothing is inherently teleological or mathematical: there is no purpose in psychology and the physical world is not a mathematical structure. Ideally, we should banish both ways of thinking from psychology and physics: no goals and no numbers. One need not agree with this point of view to appreciate its motivation: goals and numbers are not part of the given but a conceptual apparatus that we bring to bear in order to organize the facts. They are how weunderstand things not how things are in themselves (phenomenal not noumenal). Thus we cannot really make sense of the world, only our apprehension of it; in itself the world is without sense, not subject to intellectual comprehension at all. It is all, as the saying goes, just one damn thing after another, without rhyme or reason. To say that the world is intelligible can only mean that we can apply the apparatus of mathematics and teleology to it in order to organize our knowledge, but it is quite indifferent to these invocations. This is certainly an intelligible position to take on intelligibility, to be set beside the more realist position that goals and numbers are part of the fabric of objective reality. I won’t attempt to decide the issue, though I incline to the realist view.[4]

 

Colin McGinn

[1] The same is true of exercises of theoretical reasoning, i.e. acquiring beliefs by rational processes: here we use logic, a normative discipline, as a means of rendering belief formation intelligible. It is like applying mathematics to empirical reality.

[2] It is sometimes supposed that the touchstone of intelligibility is conformity to commonsense categories and principles, as with the idea that causation works only by physical contact. But conformity to common sense is neither necessary nor sufficient for intelligibility: much of physics is not part of common sense but quite intelligible (the same is true of pure mathematics), and some commonsense categories are not intelligible (at least presently)—such as consciousness and free action, arguably. Moreover, common sense has little to do with specifically intellectual knowledge as opposed to practical knowledge.

[3] We can compare mathematics with morality in this respect: moral realism can be combined with a functional view of morality. Its truths are not dependent on the human mind, but they fit human life remarkably well, as if designed to do so. Morality is not irrelevant to human life, even if its basis is extra-human. Indeed, we need to be able to combine both moral realism and moral relevance in order to give a satisfactory account of morality, as we also do in the case of mathematics.

[4] I have not discussed the extremely controversial question of whether philosophy itself renders the world intelligible. The question turns on the nature of philosophy and the form of its findings. Let me just remark that concepts have a purpose and that the notion of a calculus of concepts is not to be rejected out of hand. On the other hand, philosophy is the domain of mystery par excellence.

 

 

Philosophical Events

 

 

There are many types of event: physical, chemical, astronomical, biological, psychological, social, economic, historical, cultural. Each type of event has its own science or field of study, so that disciplines are identified via types of event. In general, these disciplines describe, predict, and explain the events that form their subject matter. Naturally, this involves dealing with certain types of object in which the events participate—material bodies, molecules, stars, organisms, psychological subjects, social groups, economic institutions, historical figures, cultures. So the sciences all deal with characteristic types of events and their associated objects, as their names suggest. They are event-specific. But philosophy is not like this: it has no class of events to call its own. There are no philosophical events that form the subject matter of philosophy; the very phrase “philosophical event” is an oxymoron. What would it even be for an event to be philosophical? Of course, there are such events as philosophical conferences or philosophical publishing events (“It was a philosophical event when Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953”), but these are not what philosophy is about. It might be said that philosophy is about other kinds of event and object, those dealt with in the sciences—physical, psychological, biological, etc. It is about what other subjects are about, while having no subject matter to call its own. While physics, say, is about physical things, philosophy is not about philosophical things—a class of distinctively philosophical entities. It may postulate philosophical entities—platonic forms, immaterial spirits, Fregean truth-values, Meinongian subsistent beings—but it isn’t about a certain class of events and objects recognized to exist in the world. There are no specifically philosophical events whose nature it strives to discover.

To the cynical this may suggest a lack of legitimate subject matter—philosophy is about nothing![1] The sciences are about things we can point to and identify, but philosophy has the null subject matter—it is just hot air devoid of any real anchor. Not only does it make no progress; it has no object of investigation on which progress could be made. Indeed, that is why it makes no progress—it isn’t about anything. But this dismissive attitude is far too quick: for philosophy isn’t alone in lacking a specific ontology of events on which to work. There are no logical events or moral events or mathematical events either. Does that mean that logic, morality, and mathematics have no legitimate subject matter? Not a specific type of event, to be sure, but does that exhaust the possibilities? Logic is about logical relations, morality is about right and wrong, mathematics is about mathematical truth: it is just that these subject matters are not event-like. There is no such thing as a number turning even or a moral value coming into existence or a logical entailment being derailed. What these subjects are about is a controversial question, but we are not required to suppose that they must be about events or about nothing—maybe they are about structures or properties or concepts or facts. Events happen, but not everything real is a happening. Philosophy belongs with these subjects in being about no distinctive class of events, but that doesn’t prevent it from being about structures or properties or concepts or facts. In fact, I believe that philosophy is about logical reality, and logic is not directed at events either.[2]

A more positive response to the recognition that philosophy is not about philosophical events is that this provides a neat way to define the nature of philosophy. It belongs to that class of intellectual inquiries that do not deal with events; it is not event-directed. Sometimes it is said that philosophy is about thought, or again about language, but on one interpretation this cannot be true: it cannot be about episodes of thought, or episodes of language, or else it would be about a particular class of events—as psychology is. It cannot be about mental acts or speech acts, since acts are events. It could be about the structure or content of thought or language, but not their occurrence—not concrete happenings. This conception is partly prompted by a desire to find something solidly empirical for philosophy to be about, but that is precisely the wrong move: it tries to assimilate philosophy to the empirical sciences that traffic in concrete events. That is the exact opposite of what philosophy does. If philosophy were about events of ordinary linguistic usage, then there would be philosophical events; but there are no philosophical events, so philosophy can’t be about that. There are events of ordinary linguistic usage, but they are the subject matter of other disciplines—linguistics, sociology—not philosophy as such. This is like supposing that morality is about events of moral (or immoral) action, but it is not about such events—rather, it is about the rules and principles that should guide action. Morality is not concerned with the description, prediction, and explanation of actions deemed moral or immoral—that is a matter for the psychology of behavior. Maybe speech acts could provide useful data for philosophy, but they are not its proper subject matter in the way that physical events are the proper subject matter of physics or speech behavior is the proper subject matter of psycholinguistics. The same is true for mathematical acts and the proper subject matter of mathematics—mathematics is not about events of doing mathematics. This is why there are no mathematical events, though there are events with a mathematical subject matter (e.g. actual calculations).

More to the point, it might be wondered how this fact about philosophy relates to the traditional idea that philosophy is an a priori science (like logic and mathematics—or even morality under some interpretations). It relates closely, but the ideas are not identical. The a priori claim is epistemological; the event claim is ontological or semantic. To say that philosophy is an a priori discipline is to say that the knowledge it produces is gained independently of experience (as the phrase goes); to say that philosophy is not about philosophical events is to make an ontological or semantic claim concerning the type of reality with which philosophy is occupied. Putting both claims together, we could say that philosophy is a priori precisely because it is not about events, that being the mark of the a posteriori. In any case, the claims are different, though related. Perhaps if there were philosophical events (whatever that might mean) philosophy would not be a priori, since those events would interact with our senses to produce philosophical knowledge; but the very oddity of that supposition shows how bizarre it is to think that there are philosophical events. In this sense it is quite wrong to hold that philosophy is “continuous with science”, as if philosophy has the same general shape as science but brings its own subject matter. We can say that biology is continuous with physics and chemistry, but in that sense philosophy is not continuous with those disciplines—as if it were concerned with a special more rarified type of event. The same can be said of logic, morality, and mathematics—none of these are “continuous with science” if that means they share science’s general preoccupation with events. Obviously, this is connected to the fact that the sciences seek causal explanations, events being the stuff of causation, but these non-event disciplines are not in that line of business. We canreasonably claim that philosophy is continuous with logic, morality, and mathematics, since all these disciplines are dedicated to aspects of reality that go beyond events; and indeed the affinity is generally recognized.

Being a priori and being concerned with something other than events are connected characteristics, but the latter is fundamental. When philosophy concerns itself with events of the ordinary type, as with the question of the relation between mental events and physical events, it is not concerned with some proprietary type of philosophical event; it is concerned with the nature of the relation between the two ordinary types of event—that is its proper subject matter. This is why the subject matter of philosophy includes all types of event but not a specific type of event peculiar to it.[3] According to one tradition, philosophy is concerned exclusively with concepts, understood abstractly, and this well captures the sense in which it is not the study of a certain type of event. The obvious fact that there are no philosophical events dramatizes the point that philosophy is not as other sciences. We could say that it is a “formal science”, but it is more illuminating to say that it has no event-like subject matter. As remarked, I think that its subject matter is logical reality, and that is far removed from the world of passing events and perishable happenings. Trying to reconfigure philosophy so that it resembles the event orientation of the sciences only leads to distortion, confusion, and cynicism.

 

C

[1] Like Seinfeld, a show about nothing, which was quite philosophical. At least astrology is about something!

[2] See my “Philosophy Defined” and Truth By Analysis. According to this conception of science and philosophy, the science of events could be completed without any philosophical problem being resolved: all events could be described, predicted, and explained without making a start on the problems of philosophy. This shows that science will never take the place of philosophy.

[3] It would be wrong to suppose that philosophy is identical with the union of all event-directed sciences, since that would simply make it a very inclusive empirical science. In order to study philosophy one would need to master all the sciences and no more.